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Paul McCartney Performs Virtual Duet With John Lennon at ‘Got Back’ Tour Kickoff

The Beatles legend Paul McCartney performed his first concert in three years in Spokane, Washington on April 28, delivering a 36-song set that even included a virtual duet with his long deceased bandmate, John Lennon .

The setlist, which can be seen toward the bottom of the page, featured 21 Beatles cuts, six tracks by Wings, a cover of The Quarrymen and the rest being a mix of solo songs that brought things all the way to the current with the live debut of "Women and Wives" off the musician's 2020 solo record,  McCartney III .

The standout moments were in abundance, but one of the most exhilarating portions of the set came when McCartney returned to the stage to kick off a six-song encore that began with "I've Got a Feeling." The track appears on The Beatles' final album, 1970's  Let It Be , and, in the  Get Back documentary which chronicles the writing and recording sessions for the album, it is one of just a handful of tracks that was part of the rooftop performance that ultimately marked the last-ever public performance by The Beatles.

Footage from that rooftop event was projected behind McCartney and his band onstage part way through the encore performance and Lennon's vocals were also added to the live mix, over which McCartney sang to execute a virtual duet with his late songwriting partner.

Watch fan-shot footage directly below.

McCartney's U.S. tour will continue through June 16 and you can see a list of remaining stops here .

Paul McCartney, "I've Got a Feeling" — Live, April 28, 2022

Paul mccartney setlist — april 28, 2022 (via setlist.fm ).

01. "Can't Buy Me Love" (The Beatles) 02. "Junior's Farm" (Wings) 03. "Letting Go" (Wings) 04. "Got to Get You Into My Life" (The Beatles) 05. "On to Me" 06. "Let Me Roll It" (Wings) (followed by "Foxy Lady" jam) 07. "Getting Better" (The Beatles) 08. "Women and Wives" 09. "My Valentine" 10. "Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five" (Wings) 11. "Maybe I'm Amazed" 12. "I've Just Seen a Face" (The Beatles) 13. "In Spite of All the Danger" (The Quarrymen) 14. "Love Me Do" (The Beatles) 15. "Dance Tonight" 16. "Blackbird" (The Beatles) 17. "Here Today" 18. "Queenie Eye" 19. "Lady Madonna" (The Beatles) 20. "Fuh You" 21. "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" (The Beatles) 22. "Something" (The Beatles, tribute to George Harrison) 23. "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" (The Beatles) 24. "You Never Give Me Your Money" (The Beatles) 25. "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window" (The Beatles) 26. "Get Back" (The Beatles) 27. "Band on the Run" (Wings) 28. "Let It Be" (The Beatles) 29. "Live and Let Die" (Wings) 30. "Hey Jude" (The Beatles)

Encore: 31. "I've Got a Feeling" (The Beatles, tribute to John Lennon) 32. "Birthday" (The Beatles) 33. "Helter Skelter" (The Beatles) 34. "Golden Slumbers" (The Beatles) 35. "Carry That Weight" (The Beatles) 36. "The End" (The Beatles)

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Paul mccartney returns to stage for john lennon ‘duet’ after 2-year hiatus.

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Paul McCartney brought John Lennon back from the grave with a little help from his friend, director Peter Jackson.

The 79-year-old rock legend took the stage at the Spokane Arena for the first show of his “Get Back” tour on Thursday evening.

And a very special guest joined him for a duet on the song “I’ve Got A Feeling.”

Footage of Lennon, who died in 1980 at the age of 40, from Jackson’s Disney+ documentary “ The Beatles: Get Back ” was presented on a big screen while the British rocker sang.

The two crooned alongside each other to kick off the new tour.

“So, Peter Jackson, the director of the ‘Get Back’ film, he texts me one day. And he says, ‘We can extract John’s voice. He can sing with you live,’” McCartney told the roaring crowd after the song finished.

Other iconic hits he sang included: “Getting Better,” “You Never Give Me Your Money” and “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window.”

The concert was The Beatles frontman’s first one since the coronavirus pandemic began two years ago.

“They said, ‘Get back,’ and we got back. And it feels cool,” he also said. “You’ll have to give me a moment to myself, just to let me take this in.”

The tour is set to run until June and he will next be seen in cities such as Seattle and Oakland, California, in the next few days.

Here is the full list of McCartney’s 2022 tour dates:

4/28 Spokane, WA – Spokane Arena 5/2 Seattle – Climate Pledge Arena 5/3 Seattle – Climate Pledge Arena 5/6 Oakland, CA – Oakland Arena 5/13 Inglewood, CA – SoFi Stadium 5/17 Fort Worth, TX – Dickies Arena 5/21 Winston Salem, NC – Truist Field 5/25 Hollywood, FL – Hard Rock Live 5/28 Orlando, FL – Camping World Stadium 5/31 Knoxville, TN – Thompson-Boling Arena 6/4 Syracuse, NY – Carrier Dome 6/7 Boston – Fenway Park 6/12 Baltimore – Orioles Park 6/16 East Rutherford, NJ – MetLife Stadium

Ahead of launching his new tour, the father of five made sure to make a heartfelt plea to Starbucks, asking them to stop charging extra for plant-based milks. He called out the pricey coffee chain’s CEO Kevin Johnson last month in an open letter he  penned with  the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

“My friends at PETA are campaigning for this,” he wrote in the memo,  first published  on Billboard.com. “I sincerely hope that for the future of the planet and animal welfare you are able to implement this policy.”

He continued, “It recently came to my attention that Starbucks in the USA has an extra charge for plant-based milks as opposed to cow’s milk.”

“I must say this surprised me,” he added, noting that Starbucks stores in his native land, the United Kingdom, do not have a charge for funky milk alternatives. “I would like to politely request that you consider this policy also in Starbucks USA.”

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Paul McCartney Wows Spokane Crowd With Virtual John Lennon Duet on Beatles Classic

Macca kicked off his "Got Back" tour in Spokane on Thursday night and gave the audience a truly nostalgic "feeling."

By Gil Kaufman

Gil Kaufman

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Sir Paul McCartney had a fistful of surprises for the audience at Thursday night’s (April 28) kick-off of his “Got Back” tour at Spokane Arena in Spokane, Washington. And while the first performance of “Getting Better” in nearly 20 years and the live debut of the McCartney III song “Women and Wives” were both nice, it was the first song of the show’s 6-song encore that blew minds.

See latest videos, charts and news

John Lennon

Paul mccartney.

In a tribute to his late writing partner, McCartney blew minds when he did a virtual duet with John Lennon on the 1970 Let It Be classic “ I’ve Got a Feeling ” by screening footage from the Beatles’ legendary Jan. 1969 rooftop gig atop the band’s Apple Corps HQ in London. Unlike other acts who’ve performed with deceased bandmates via hologram or other digital trickery, fan-shot video of the get back between the two felt downright heartwarming.

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McCartney began the song strumming a guitar with a swirl of pastel colors on the screen behind him and then elicited gasps of elation when mid-way through when Lennon’s voice came in for his verse as Macca turned toward the screen to watch. “Everybody had a hard year/ Everybody had a good time/ Everybody had a wet dream/ Everybody saw the sunshine,” Lennon sang in the footage as McCartney sang counter-melodies.

Trending on Billboard

After the performance, McCartney explained how it came together, telling the audience, “So, Peter Jackson, the director of the  Get Back  film, he texts me one day. And he says, ‘we can extract John’s voice. And he can sing with you live.’” The crowd roared at the idea and McCartney, 79, shrugged and added, “I thought, well…”

McCartney’s first tour since 2019 will hit 13 cities across 14 dates. The tour’s next stop is a two-night stand at Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle, Washington on May 2-3.

Check out a clip from the “I’ve Got a Feeling” virtual duet below.

Last night, Paul McCartney sang The Beatles song, “I’ve Got a Feeling”, with the voice of John Lennon for the first time since 1969: pic.twitter.com/RqN4aeQdDm — The Beatles (@BeatlesEarth) April 29, 2022

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‘They said get back, we got back. It feels cool’: Sir Paul McCartney duets with John Lennon during historic Spokane show

The beatles star and solo artist kicked off a north american tour in spokane, washington. andrew buncombe reports, article bookmarked.

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Sir Paul McCartney made history with his first ever gig in the city of Spokane last night (Thursday 28 April). It was a concert that included “a duet” with John Lennon – courtesy of electronic wizardry – and huge cheers when the Beatles legend waved a Ukrainian flag .

It was McCartney's first concert since the summer of 2019. When he first walked out on to the stage, the 79-year-old had to pause for a moment, apparently struck by the emotion of being back on the road – amid a pandemic that has destroyed and upended so much, not least live music.

“They said ‘get back”, and we got back. And it feels cool,” he said. “You’ll have to give me a moment to myself, just to let me take this in.”

It was one of several moments during the opening concert of his “Got Back” Tour, comprised from 16 stops before his headline show at Glastonbury Festival on June 25 (which happens to be a week after his 80th birthday).

“How are you Spokane?” McCartney asked. “I think we’re going to have a good night.”

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And they did. McCartney has never reached for the onstage swagger of someone such as Mick Jagger, but his performance was in many ways remarkable. The set included his first ever live performance of the entirety of “You Never Give Me Your Money” , a song that comes towards the end of Side Two of Abbey Road, The Beatles’ final recording together. And he also played “In Spite of All the Danger”, a stripped down tune he once perfomed with The Quarrymen, the group that predated The Beatles.

While people were struck by the reach of McCartney’s voice, the septuagenarian was at his most moving when that voice did not quite reach the notes it once did.

“Lots of people trying to learn this song ‘Blackbird’,” he said good-naturedly, before he started to play. “And you all get it wrong.”

One felt similary when he and his band returned to the stage for an encore, the former Beatle earning loud cheers by waving a huge Ukraine flag. “We’ve got something pretty special for you,” he said.

And so they did, a performance of “I’ve Got A Feeling”, with John Lennon singing along courtesy of the work of Get Back director Peter Jackson. One of the highlights of the documentary film is the concert they played on 30 January 1969, on the rooftop of their Apple Corps London headquarters at 3 Savile Row. The once grainy footage is now embellished with deep colour and tones.

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“Peter Jackson said ‘I can pull John’s voice out if you’d like me to,“ McCartney told the audience.

And so they played along, McCartney – his grey hair worn long – and Lennon, who was shot dead in New York City on 8 December 1980, for a moment seeming to have avoided that fatal encounter with obsessive fan Mark David Chapman. He was back with his band one more time, on the happy but bitter-sweet January afternoon, representing as it did, the Beatles' final live performance.

The city of Spokane, with its population of 220,000, sits about 300 miles east of Seattle and 90 miles from the border with Canada. While it is the second largest city in Washington state, it has something of the feel of a country town – one that is markedly more conservative that liberal Seattle. Were people surprised he was playing here, packing out the 8,000 seater Spokane Arena?

“I'm not surprised. We’ve had Elton John here and Rod Stewart,” said Mary Mitchell, 58, originally from Montana, who was at the gig with her London-born husband, Stephen. “It’s awesome,” she said.

He likes to try out these smaller venues

Another couple in the audience, Debby and Jim Bangs, 70, said they had previously seen McCartney in Missoula, Montana, when he performed at an outdoor festival in 2014.

“He likes to try out these smaller venues,” Debby, who hoped McCartney would play her favourite song, “Birthday”, observed.

Jim was wanted McCartney to perform ”Till There Was You“, a song originally written and performed by Meredith Wilson, which The Beatles covered and included on their 1963 album, With The Beatles. Jim said he used to sing it to their son when he was a baby. This time, McCartney didn't include it in his set, but he did play ”Get Back“, another favourite.

Officials said tickets for the show sold out in minutes.

“People are very excited,” Brian Coddington, a spokesperson for the city said ahead of the concert.

He added: “It’s a great opportunity to help Paul McCartney to kick off his tour and also showcase our community to the world.”

McCartney and his band played for more than two-and-a-hours, and worked their way through a setlist containing 36 songs.

“Thank you,” said McCartney. “Thank you.”

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‘You’ve been a fantastic audience for our opening night,’ McCartney told the sellout crowd in Spokane, WA.

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Paul McCartney and his band opened their Got Back tour with his first visit to Spokane, WA last night (28), delivering a spectacular 36-song show. It included a virtual duet with John Lennon and the live debut of “Women and Wives,” from his McCartney III album.

“Wow, is all I can say [is] you’ve been a fantastic audience for our opening night,” McCartney told the sellout audience at the Spokane Veterans Memorial Arena. Another highlight was his interaction with Lennon on The Beatles ’ “I’ve Got A Feeling,” for which Lennon was seen in footage from the group’s famous rooftop concert, as seen in in the Get Back docuseries .

McCartney, two months from his 80th birthday, opened the show with “Can’t Buy Me Love” before heading into his Wings period of the 1970s for the singles “Junior’s Farm” and “Letting Go.” He ended the main set with “Let It Be,” “Live and Let Die,” and “Hey Jude,” returning for a further selection of Beatles songs culminating in “Carry That Weight/The End.” He also waved a Ukrainian flag, a gesture that Ed Condran in Spokane’s Spokesman-Review said was “befitting so much of McCartney’s career – celebratory, reflective, political and revolutionary.

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“The great Brit remains charming and humorous as he delivered songs from a canon that is unparalleled in terms of depth and quality,” continued the review. “Who else has such range, brilliance and the ability to strike such a chord? McCartney finally played Spokane a mere 58 years after changing the world by performing on The Ed Sullivan Show .”

The Got Back tour continues next Monday (May 2) at the Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle, with dates extending June 16. McCartney then crosses the Atlantic for his much-vaunted headliner at Glastonbury Festival on June 25.

Listen to the best of Paul McCartney on  Apple Music  and  Spotify .

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Paul mccartney does virtual duet with john lennon during wa concert, paul mccartney virtual duet with john lennon ... i've got a feeling, wa.

Paul McCartney and John Lennon 's relationship is often seen as bitter, but this week ... Macca seems to have made it clear ... him and John can still come together, even now.

The Beatles frontman was performing this week in Spokane, WA ... and toward the end of the show, during an encore performance, PMC started strumming to his band's song "I've Got a Feeling" -- which appears on The Beatles' last album, "Let It Be."

The song is also featured in their new 'Get Back' documentary ... featured as one of the songs Paul and co. performed on the rooftop of Apple Corps HQ in London.

Of course, he was also side by side with his then-bandmates -- including the late Lennon -- which is what this moment all the more cool ... Paul beamed in JL's video performance of the song live and worked it into the set.

As soon as John's face appeared on the screen behind Paul, the audience went crazy ... and it seems his vocals were coming through quite nicely through the sound system in the building.

Paul weaved in and out of John's singing seamlessly with his own, and at one point ... they were in a full-blown duet together, just like old times. Before John faded out, it appears Paul even turned to face the screen to give a thank you wave.

It was seriously awesome, and kinda puts to bed the idea that there's any bad blood between the pair -- despite the fact Paul recently cast blame on John for breaking up the band .

We won't relitigate all that again ... and leave it at this ... the boys can let it be!

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Sir Paul McCartney has opened up about a particularly emotional moment during his current tour.

As fans who’ve seen the first two Australian shows in his current Got Back tour know, McCartney’s show includes a virtual duet with his late bandmate John Lennon.

During the encore of his set for both his Adelaide and Melbourne shows, McCartney, 81, performed a duet of Beatles hit I’ve Got A Feeling with Lennon.

He spoke about the touching moment, which he called one of his favourite parts of the show.

“It’s kind of magic for me, because at one point I’m just backing John up,” he said in an interview ahead of his tour Down Under.

“I’m playing guitar and he’s singing in his middle bit [sings]: ‘Everybody had a good year’. And then I join him with ‘I got a feeling’. And so now there’s two of us together. And now I’ve got to actually really keep in with him.”

“And that’s beautiful because that’s like it was when you played live, you know, to be conscious of the other person, and do your part right alongside him. So yeah, it’s very emotional for me. I love it.”

McCartney recalled the first time he and his band played the duet in front of an audience, saying it felt real despite being made possible through technology.

“It was hard to hold your emotions back actually, because it was one of those … you could just get overcome.

“Because it was the magic – it was my buddy, who’s been dead a long time, and here he was, back, and I’m working with him again.

“And even though it’s sort of mechanical trickery it feels very real,” he sighed.

“So it was great.”

The moving moment is made possible through Machine Assisted Learning (MAL).

McCartney described how Lennon’s voice has been isolated from the soundtrack of The Beatles iconic rooftop performance, and that with the video playing on the big screen, he’s able to play along with his friend.

He also spoke to The Beatles’ beginning, telling the tale of how two boys from Liverpool who liked to write music found each other.

“I look back on it and you marvel … You know, it’s just me and John, how did we get together? How did that happen?

“Well, I don’t know. I just knew a friend and he knew a friend and I met him, and we just decided we both were the only people we knew who wrote songs. So we suddenly were sitting down and writing them.

“And then now I’m here talking on a computer screen, on the Zoom. It’s just staggering, but I’m very proud of it and it is lovely to be the custodian of those songs, yeah.”

McCartney has since kicked off his Australian tour, already stopping in Adelaide and Melbourne.

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Paul McCartney Reflects on John Lennon’s Death: ‘It Was Just So Horrific’

• By Kory Grow

During a recent appearance on The Jonathan Ross Show , Paul McCartney recounted how he found out about the death of John Lennon . The Beatle was murdered outside of his New York City apartment 34 years ago today.

“I was at home, and I got a phone call,” McCartney told the talk-show host. “It was early in the morning…. I think it was like that for everyone. It was just so horrific that you couldn’t take it in – I couldn’t take it in. Just for days, you just couldn’t think that he was gone. So, yeah, it was just a huge shock and then I had to tell Linda and the kids. It was very difficult. It was really difficult for everyone. That was like a really big shock, I think, in most people’s lives. A bit like Kennedy, there were certain moments like that.”

Ross then related that it was a shock for him as well, but that he didn’t know him. “Yeah, for me it was just so sad that I wasn’t going to see him again, and we weren’t going to hang out,” McCartney said. “And, for me, the biggest thing was that the guy who took his life, the phrase kept coming to my head, ‘Jerk of all jerks.’ It was just like, ‘This is just a jerk.’ This is not even a guy politically motivated. It’s just some total random thing, some guy going, ‘Hey,’ bop.”

In a lighter moment on the show, McCartney also told a story about reliving the iconic, street-crossing cover of the Beatles ‘ Abbey Road . “I’ve always wanted to recreate it, and I do often think, you see some Japanese fans, I think, ‘I’ll just hop out,'” he said. “But this Halloween, we’d been to a Halloween party at my daughter Mary’s, and I had this amazing werewolf mask that scared the little grandkids and I had to take it off for them. Anyways, I’m going home and I’ve still got this big mask on. And we got to the crossing, so I got, ‘We’ve got to do it.’ And it’s like 11 o’clock.”

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McCartney’s wife Nancy got her camera and the former Beatle held up traffic to take a shot. “I’m there with the werewolf thing and this guy looking very annoyed [in a car],” McCartney said.

In other McCartney news, the singer recently made a video for his song “Hope for the Future,” which appears in the video game Destiny . It features the singer-songwriter as a hologram appearing around the galaxy depicted in the game. McCartney also recently put out a 3-D video of his song “Live and Let Die,” which he recorded during his concert at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park.

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Paul McCartney’s heartwarming tribute to Beatles icon John Lennon

During a recent show on his “Got Back” tour, Paul McCartney paid tribute to his late Beatles bandmate, John Lennon.

“Give Peace a Chance”

During McCartney’s December 9 show in Brazil, he paid tribute to Lennon. First, he played “Here Today,” a song from his album Tug of War. This is a staple of his setlists, and he always tells the story of how the song was written about Lennon.

After that, he went into an impromptu cover of Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance.” He hit a few piano notes and led the singalong.

“Give Peace a Chance used to be a staple of McCartney’s sets. He used to play a medley of it attached to the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.”

The cover was short-lived, and McCartney subsequently went into his song “New,” the lead single from his 2013 album.

John Lennon died on December 8, 1980. He was only 40 years old but left behind a legendary legacy for his time with the Beatles and his solo career.

Paul McCartney is currently embarking on the final dates of his “Got Back” tour, his first since the pandemic. It began in April 2022 with 16 dates across North America. The first leg of the tour culminated with a headlining performance at the Glastonbury Festival last year.

In 2023, McCartney and his band went back on the road. They played dates across Australia and Mexico before heading to Brazil. As of the time of this writing, the “Got Back” tour is set to conclude on December 16, with a show at Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The post Paul McCartney’s heartwarming tribute to Beatles icon John Lennon appeared first on ClutchPoints .

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Remembering John Lennon and Paul McCartney's Last Recording Together — Four Years After the Beatles’ Split

Fifty years ago, the pair put aside the pain of the band's breakup to quietly reunite in the studio — and the result is not what you'd expect.

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Last fall the Beatles released “Now and Then,” a long-awaited digital reunion between all four Fabs was made possible through cutting edge technology. Touted as the final entry in the band’s storied cannon, it provided fans with a happy ending to a 60-year saga and the chance to hear Paul McCartney join voices with his late partner John Lennon once again. Though indeed moving, it was a reunion that didn’t occur in reality. The Beatles tragically never reconvened in the studio prior to Lennon’s murder on Dec. 8, 1980 — robbing the world of more potential Beatles albums, and McCartney of his dear friend.

Many assume that Lennon and McCartney’s recording relationship ended with the band’s breakup at the dawn of the ‘70s. But in truth, they quietly teamed up in an LA studio for a one-off impromptu session in 1974. The results were chaotic, unfinished, and (technically) unreleased, but the bootleg tapes are historic for capturing that iconic vocal blend for the very last time. It proves that despite the bitterness of the prior breakup, their bond remained intact. 

The diverse and nuanced reasons for the Beatles’ split are as complex as the men themselves, requiring volumes of books — not to mention legal documents — to unravel. The partnership was dealt its mortal blow with the death of band manager Brian Epstein in August 1967. McCartney did his best to navigate the group through the ensuing upheaval, but his de facto leadership was read as overbearing by his band mates — particularly Lennon, who, since the world beating success of 1967’s groundbreaking Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band , had largely abdicated his creative role due to his own emotional maelstrom of insecurity, boredom, and resentment. “After Brian died, we collapsed,” Lennon said in an infamous interview with Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner in December 1970 . “Paul took over and supposedly led us. But what is leading us, when we went round in circles? We broke up then. That was the disintegration.”

McCartney’s perfectionism in the studio gave him a reputation as a hard task master — “He’s the workaholic!” Ringo Starr once joked, while the band’s producer George Martin chose the word “overbossy” — but beginning with sessions for the ‘White Album’ in 1968, Lennon began openly sniping at McCartney’s work. He particularly loathed the music hall influenced numbers like “Martha My Dear” and “Ob-La-Da, Ob-La-Da,” which he memorably dismissed as “Paul’s granny music s---.” The latter song nearly provoked a battle royale in the studio before Lennon stormed out — only to return again hours later, in a chemically altered state of consciousness. (The sessions for the song were so unpleasant that longtime engineer Geoff Emerick resigned rather than tolerate the bad vibes.) 

For McCartney, the hostility was painful. “John and I were critical of each other's music and I felt John wasn't much interested in performing anything he hadn't written himself,” he told Life in 1971. “So I felt the split coming. And John kept saying we were musically standing still."

Lennon wasn’t particularly taken with the high concept McCartney-helmed projects that the band were obliged to go along with. The 1967 television film Magical Mystery Tour had been a costly flop that was barely salvaged by the soundtrack EP (and eventual album), and the tense sessions recorded for the Let It Be documentary captured just as many squabbles as songs. “The film was set up by Paul for Paul,” Lennon told Wenner. “That is one of the main reasons the Beatles ended. I can't speak for George, but I pretty damn well know we got fed up of being sidemen for Paul…The camera work was set up to show Paul and not anybody else. And that's how I felt about it." The lead single from the project, “Get Back,” was a McCartney composition that Lennon (supposedly) took to be a thinly veiled dig at Yoko Ono , his new romantic partner, who attended each session along with the band. “When we were in the studio recording it, every time he sang the line 'Get back to where you once belonged,' he'd look at Yoko," he claimed. 

This particular instance is likely a product of Lennon’s own paranoia, but the Beatles hardly welcomed Ono with open arms when Lennon chose to make her a permanent fixture at the band’s sessions. "It was like old army buddies splitting up on account of wedding bells,” McCartney reflected in the Beatles Anthology . “He'd fallen in love, and none of us was stupid enough to say, 'Oh, you shouldn't love her.' We could recognize that, but that didn't diminish the hurt we were feeling by being pushed aside.” 

McCartney’s rejection of Ono — real or imagined, playful or malicious — stung Lennon in a way that few things could, and he began to emotionally distance himself from his longtime partner as a self-protective measure. “[Paul] said it many times that at first he hated Yoko, and then he got to like her. But it's too late for me,” he told Wenner. “Ringo was all right, but the other two really gave it to us…I can't forgive 'em for that, really. Although I can't help still loving them either."

When McCartney married Linda Eastman in 1969, he proposed that her father Lee, a prominent New York entertainment lawyer, take over the band’s business affairs that had previously been managed by Epstein. Lennon understandably feared that McCartney’s father-in-law could never be a neutral third party, and instead favored Allen Klein, a brusque and streetwise business barracuda. His shady business reputation had earned him somewhere in the vicinity of 50 lawsuits — Epstein met him once and refused to shake his hand — but Lennon was drawn to his down-to-earth nature. Starr and Harrison followed suit, leaving an awkward three-to-one vote. McCartney never accepted Klein as his manager, taking issue with all manner of business and creative decisions made under his direction. Lennon took this as a personal affront. 

On Sept. 26, 1969, with his confidence bolstered by his first major non-Beatle live performance in years at the Toronto Rock ‘n’ Roll Revival Festival, Lennon reported for duty at a Beatles business meeting and made his push for independence. When McCartney suggested the band return to their roots by going on tour, Lennon shut him down immediately. “I think you're daft,” he snarled. “I wasn't going to tell you, but I'm breaking the group up. It feels good. It feels like a divorce.” No one — not even Ono — had seen it coming. "Our jaws dropped," McCartney recalled. Klein and the other Beatles convinced Lennon to keep the news under wraps so it wouldn’t disrupt lucrative business deals in the works. McCartney hoped it was one of Lennon’s moody outbursts, but he remained resolute. When McCartney called six months later to say that he was also leaving the group and readying a solo album, Lennon was unmoved. “That makes two of us who have accepted it mentally,” he replied.

The album in question, titled simply McCartney , was released in April 1970. Press copies included a Q&A that spelled out the fact that the Beatles were finished due to “personal differences, business differences, and musical differences,” and he didn’t foresee a Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership continuing into the future. The stunt, which made global headlines on April 10, enraged Lennon, who had planned to make the big announcement himself when the time was right. "I wanted to do it and I should have done it,” he said later. “I was a fool not to do it, not to do what Paul did, which was use it to sell a record." 

On Dec. 31, 1970, McCartney began legal proceedings to dissolve the Beatles partnership, stretching relations between the formerly Fab foursome to the breaking point. According to legend, at one point Lennon was chauffeured over to McCartney’s London home and tossed a brick through his front window. (Another version has Lennon breaking in and destroying a painting he had gifted him.) Both stories are likely apocryphal but the sentiments were based in reality. 

That same month, an emotionally raw Lennon, fresh off months of psychologically excruciating Primal Scream therapy, sat down with Wenner to give Rolling Stone ’s readers their first look at the beloved band’s dirtiest laundry. “The publication of these interviews was the first time that any of the Beatles, let alone the man who had founded the group and was their leader, finally stepped outside of that protected, beloved fairy tale and told the truth,” Wenner later wrote. “He was bursting and bitter about the sugarcoated mythology of the Beatles and Paul McCartney’s characterization of the breakup.”

McCartney’s response was, characteristically, more subtle. On his second solo disc, 1971’s Ram , he included a jab at Lennon on the opener, “Too Many People,” scoffing at the ex-bandmate’s exhortations for world peace. “The first line is: ‘too many people preaching practices,” he told MOJO in 2001. “I felt John and Yoko were telling everyone what to do. And I felt we didn't need to be told what to do. The whole tenor of the Beatles thing had been, like, to each his own. Freedom. Suddenly it was ‘You should do this.’ It was just a bit the wagging finger, and I was pissed off with it.” (The other lyrical barb, "You took your lucky break and broke it in two," is fairly self-explanatory.)

Few fans picked up on the slight, but Lennon got the reference, and perhaps invented one or two that weren’t actually there. “He’s so obscure other people didn't notice them, but I heard them,” he railed. “I thought 'Well, I’m not obscure, I just get right down to the nitty-gritty.'” He fired back on Imagine , his 1971 masterpiece best remembered for the visions of a tolerant utopia on the opening track. “How Do You Sleep” is the spiritual inverse, a diss track so venomous and overt that it borders on obscene. Even more wounding to McCartney, the slide guitar on the track was played by his fellow Beatle brother, George Harrison . 

In film footage of the session, later released as part of the Imagine documentary, Lennon can be seen huddled with Harrison and Ono, gleefully giggling like conspiratorial children as they trash their former friend. “The sound you make is muzak to my ears/You must have learned something in all those years,” Lennon sings, before taking a shot at McCartney’s most famous song: “ The only thing you done was ‘Yesterday’/And since you’re gone you’re just another day.” (The original words were “and you probably pinched that bitch anyway,” until Klein insisted that he remove the potentially libelous line.) Starr happened to be visiting the studio the day of the recording, and was so scandalized by the lines that he angrily urged Lennon to back off. 

Several years later, when he’d cooled off slightly, Lennon attempted to defuse the song, saying that he was “using somebody as an object to create something. I wasn't really feeling that vicious at the time, but I  was using my resentment towards Paul to create a song.” Even so, the lines undoubtedly hurt McCartney, though he was loathe to punch back. “When John did 'How Do You Sleep,’ I didn't want to get into a slanging match,” he told author Barry Miles in his authorized biography, All These Years from Now . “I just let him do it, because he was being fed a lot of those lines by Klein and Yoko, I had the option of going for equal time and doing all the interviews or deciding to not take up the gauntlet, and I remember consciously thinking, ‘No, I really mustn't.’ Part of it was cowardice: John was a great wit, and I didn't want to go fencing with the rapier champion of East Cheam. That was not a good idea. And I also knew that those vibes could snowball, and you start off with a perfectly innocent little contest and suddenly you find yourself doing duel to the death with the Lennon figure and it's, ‘Oh, my God, what have I carved out here?’ But it meant that I had to take s---.”

When McCartney did respond publicly, on 1971’s Wild Life , it was with an olive branch. His first Wings venture included the mournful “Dear Friend,” an open letter to Lennon that matched “How Do You Sleep” for candor. Built around a haunting solo piano figure, a grief-stricken McCartney sounds lost as he wonders if this was “really the borderline” of their friendship. Lennon kept his response to the song to himself, but the public sparring soon ceased. 

As their business and legal affairs untangled by the middle of the decade, McCartney attempted to carry on as if it were old times. “I would ring him when I went to New York and he would say, 'Yeah, what d'you want?' 'I just thought we might meet?' 'Yeah, what the f--- d'you want, man?'” he told Miles. “It was all very acrimonious and bitter. I remember one time John said, 'You're all pizza and fairy tales.' I thought, ‘What a great album title!’ I said, 'Well, if that's what I am, I'm not wholly against that description of me. I can think of worse things to say.' But another time I called him and it was 'Yeah? Yeah? Whadda ya want?' He suddenly started to sound American. I said, 'Oh, f--- off, Kojak,' and slammed the phone down; we were having those kind of times, it was bad news.”

Relations gradually thawed, and on March 28, 1974 , the unthinkable occurred: Lennon and McCartney jammed together in a recording studio. Unfortunately, the results were a drugged-up shambles. Lennon was at Burbank Studios producing what would become the album Pussy Cats for his friend, Harry Nilsson. In the midst of his 18-month separation from Ono, he frequently anesthetized himself with booze and cocaine, which he generously shared with fellow players Stevie Wonder , Jesse Ed Davis and Bobby Keys. McCartney arrived into this atmosphere of debauchery, and attempted to coax a song out of this supergroup. “There were 50 other people playing, all just watching me and Paul,” Lennon later remembered. Tapes from the session reveal only semi-complete versions of Little Richard's “Lucille” and the Ben E. King slow burn “Stand By Me,” often interrupted by technical problems. Though mostly incomplete and largely unlistenable, it’s the final time Lennon and McCartney’s sweet and sour vocal blend was captured on tape. (Though never released formally, the sessions eventually surfaced on the bootleg,  A Toot and a Snore in ’74 .)

Lennon returned to New York City several months later, where he reunited with his other great love: Yoko Ono. Their reconciliation had been mediated by, of all people, McCartney. A lonely Ono had paid him a visit and explained her terms for rekindling their romance, which McCartney dutifully passed along to Lennon. “I said, 'Yoko was through London and she said she wouldn't mind getting back together. How about you? Would you be interested in that?'” McCartney later explained. “He said, 'Yeah.' That he still loved her and stuff. So I said, 'Here's the deal. You've got to go back to New York. You've got to go get a flat, court her, so-and-so ...' and that's just what he did. That's how they got back together again.”

Soon after the reconciliation, Lennon retired from the music industry to focus on raising their newborn son, Sean. Tensions eased enough for McCartney to occasionally drop by the couple’s new Upper West Side apartment in the ultra-luxe Dakota building when business took music him to America. “He visits me every time he's in New York, like all the other rock 'n" roll creeps,” Lennon laughed at the time. “So whenever he's in town I see him. He comes over and we just sit around and get mildly drunk and reminisce.” 

On April 24, 1976, they settled in to watch the hip new comedy program, Saturday Night Live , when they found themselves in the peculiar situation of being addressed on air by the show’s producer, Lorne Michaels. Mocking the exorbitant sums of money the Beatles were being offered to reunite, Michaels held up a hilariously paltry check for just $3,000. Amazingly, the joke nearly succeeded. “John said, ‘It's only downtown, we could go now. Come on, let's just show up. Should we, should we?’ and for a second it was like, ‘Yeah, yeah!’ But we decided not to.” (Lennon admitted, “We nearly got a cab, but we were actually too tired.”) 

The night was reportedly be the last time the two men, who had shared so much over the previous two decades, ever shared a room. As they parted ways, Lennon patted McCartney on the shoulder and offered a mock-maudlin farewell: “Think about me every now and then, old friend.”

They managed to stay connected over telephone for the next several years. “I realized that I couldn't always ring him up to ask about business, which was my main priority at the time,” said McCartney . “It was better to talk about cats, or baking bread, or babies. So we did that, and I had a lot in common with him because we were having our babies and I was into a similar sort of mode.” McCartney placed a call to his old partner just before Lennon’s 40 th birthday on Oct. 9, 1980. “[It was] very nice. I remember he said, ‘Do they play me against you against me like they play you against me?’ Because there were always people in the background pitting us against each other. And I said, ‘Yeah, they do…’” It was the final time they spoke.

McCartney would always regret that he was never able to sit down and fully hash out all their differences before Lennon was gunned down on a chilly December night in 1980. But in an interview given hours before his death, Lennon spoke in uncharacteristically glowing terms of his one-time partner. “There’s only ever been two artists I’ve ever worked with for more than a one-night-stand, as it were,” he told RKO Radio . “That’s Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono. I think that’s a pretty damn good choice. As a talent scout, I’ve done pretty damn well.” Though effusive words rarely came easily to the man who penned “All You Need Is Love,” mutual friend Harry Nilsson once told a story that summed up Lennon’s feelings for his musical soul mate. “Someone told me … they saw John walking on the street once wearing a button saying ‘I Love Paul.’ And this girl asked him, ‘Why are you wearing a button that says “I Love Paul”?’ He said, ‘Because I love Paul.’”

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“Apparently, we were on stage playing the Del-Vikings doo-wop number 'Come Go With Me,’ and Paul arrived on his bicycle and saw us playing,” Rod Davis of The Quarrymen recalled to Billboard . “It was somebody we didn’t know, Paul, who met someone we did know. It wasn’t a big deal. You explain this to people, particularly Americans, and they expect there to be angels hiding behind clouds blowing trumpets. It’s all terribly, terribly a non-event — except in hindsight.”

During the meeting , mutual friend Ivan Vaughan introduced the two — and McCartney joined the band a few months later. While they eventually changed the direction of their sound to rock ‘n’ roll — and their name to The Beatles — what made their eventually success so sweet was the tight friendship between Lennon and McCartney, the songwriters of the group.

Lennon and McCartney bonded over losing their mothers at a young age

While their likemindedness for music brought them together, their connection grew out of a shared sense of tragedy. McCartney had lost his mother, Mary, from breast cancer in October 1956 when he was 14 and Lennon’s mother, Julia, was killed by a speeding car in July 1958 when he was 17.

“We had a kind of bond that we both knew about that, we knew that feeling,” McCartney told The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in September 2019. “I never thought that it affected my music until years later. I certainly didn’t mean it to be. But it could be, you know those things can happen.”

While many believe those painful losses led to powerful songs like 1965’s “Yesterday,” which came to McCartney in a dream , and 1970’s “Let It Be,” McCartney never outrightly had those intentions.

READ MORE: Meet Brian Epstein, the Man Who Discovered The Beatles

McCartney said he 'would do anything' for Lennon

Lennon and McCartney always understood that their kinship couldn’t be replicated. “John and me, we were kids growing up together, in the same environment with the same influences,” McCartney told Rolling Stone in 2016. “He knows the records I know, I know the records he knows. You’re writing your first little innocent songs together. Then you’re writing something that gets recorded. Each year goes by, and you get the cooler clothes. Then you write the cooler song to go with the cooler clothes. We were on the same escalator – on the same step of the escalator, all the way. It’s irreplaceable – that time, friendship and bonding.”

In short, they were family. “He's like a brother. I love him,” Lennon, who was shot dead on December 8, 1980, said in one of his last interviews . “Families — we certainly have our ups and downs and our quarrels. But at the end of the day, when it's all said and done, I would do anything for him, and I think he would do anything for me.”

Near the end of The Beatles, McCartney didn't 'see an awful lot of support' from his bandmates

But the fairytale didn’t last. What started out as a very fair four-way collaboration with their fellow Beatles bandmates George Harrison and Ringo Starr — which garnered 20 No. 1 hits — dissolved into nothing but tension.

At one session in January 1969, McCartney pleaded to his bandmates according to Rolling Stone , “I don’t see why any of you, if you’re not interested, got yourselves into this. What’s it for? It can’t be for the money. Why are you here? I’m here because I want to do a show, but I don’t see an awful lot of support.”

He was met with stone-cold silence.

It was a telling moment, which eventually led to the band’s breakup the next year. While fingers have been pointed at Lennon’s love, Yoko Ono , and on the band’s new manager, Allen Klein, a myriad of factors piled together caused the legendary breakup in April 1970.

The band’s dynamics had always been fair, but subtle. Since Lennon started the band, he technically had seniority, even though they always split their votes evenly four ways. Their global success was so far out of comprehension that they sought to find purpose, taking a retreat to study transcendental meditation at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in Rishikesh, India. Instead, it added to the tension, as they started leaving one by one.

McCartney also said that the discovery that Lennon and Ono were using heroin “was a fairly big shocker,” compounding the stress. However that played out behind closed doors, it’s clear that McCartney and Lennon hardly collaborated on music together again after Ono got so deep into the picture.

READ MORE: Did Yoko Ono Break Up The Beatles?

When The Beatles broke up, Lennon said 'the dream is over'

Ultimately contract disputes, creative disagreements — and oh-so-many heated arguments (in one, Lennon wanted his songs and McCartney’s songs on opposites sides of a vinyl record) unraveled into disrepair. And in April 1970, after McCartney refused to push back the release of his solo debut to allow Let It Be to come out first, the break-up was complete. McCartney beat Lennon to the punch, officially announcing the band was over.

“I wanted to do it and I should have done it,” Lennon said . “I was a fool not to do it, not to do what Paul did, which was use it to sell a record. I started the band, I disbanded it. It’s as simple as that… the dream is over.”

But McCartney countered that The Beatles breakup was because of “straightforward jealousy” and that he wasn’t to blame since “Ringo left first, then George, then John. I was the last to leave! It wasn’t me!”

READ MORE: How The Beatles Got Together and Became the Best-Selling Band of All Time

Lennon wrote McCartney an angry letter

The end of The Beatles wasn’t the end of the rivalry between Lennon and McCartney. A letter from Lennon, estimated to be from about 1971, which was auctioned off by Boston’s RR House in 2016, captured the level of the anger in typewritten font.

Written on the letterhead of Bag Productions Inc. — Lennon and Oko’s joint company, it reads, “I was reading your letter and wondering what middle aged cranky Beatle fan wrote it,” going on to point the finger at McCartney’s wife, Linda .

One of the most heated passages reads, “Do you really think most of today’s art came about because of The Beatles? I don’t believe you’re that insane — Paul — do you believe that? When you stop believing it you might wake up! Didn’t we always say we were part of the movement — not all of it? — Of course, we changed the world, but try and follow it through. GET OFF YOUR GOLD DISC AND FLY!”

They began to reconcile during Lennon's 'Lost Weekend' period

From the summer of 1973 to early 1975, Lennon disappeared into a creative and outrageous period of his life dubbed his Lost Weekend — which included an accidental reconciliation with McCartney.

Lennon was at Burbank Studios on March 28, 1974, producing a record for Harry Nilsson — when an unannounced visitor stopped by: McCartney, along with his wife. “I jammed with Paul,” Lennon revealed in a later interview . “We did a lot of stuff in L.A., though there were 50 other people playing, all just watching me and Paul.” As of now, it’s the only recorded instance of them playing together again before Lennon’s death. The session’s tape came out on a bootleg release, A Toot and a Snore in ‘74 .

READ MORE: Inside John Lennon's 'Lost Weekend' Period

McCartney still has 'a lot of dreams about John'

In Lennon’s later years, the friends did continue to speak from time to time. McCartney told BBC , “I would make calls to John occasionally,” he said. “We just talked kids and baking bread.”

As the stitches of their former union started to be sewn, the unthinkable happened when Lennon was gunned down right near his Dakota home in New York City in 1980. “It was a really big shock in everyone’s life, a bit like Kennedy,” McCartney said on The Jonathan Ross Show . “It was just so sad that I wasn’t going to see him again, we weren’t going to hang out.”

Nowadays, McCartney still dreams about his former best friend, as he revealed on The Late Show in September 2019. “The thing is when you’ve had a relationship like that for so long, it was such a deep relationship. I love it when people revisit you in your dreams. So, I often have band dreams and they’re crazy... I have a lot of dreams about John. And they’re always good.”

But perhaps his most poignant memory was a seemingly mundane one a few years after the band split. “He hugged me. It was great, because we didn’t normally do that,” McCartney told Rolling Stone . “He said, ‘It’s good to touch.’ I always remembered that – it’s good to touch.”

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Whenever Paul McCartney picks up the guitar to compose new music he still wonders what John Lennon would make of it.

"John's input was very important … These days even when I'm writing the song, I would kind of check with him just mentally, you know: 'Does this suck? Like, I think it does? Right. Let's get rid of it. Start again.' Yeah, so I really miss that."

McCartney, who's preparing to return to Australia later this year, opened up about his creative process in an exclusive TV interview with 7.30 .

He described how one of music's greatest duos would get together and write the Beatles tunes that have inspired generations for 60 years.

"You know, we go in a room, two guitars, sitting opposite each other. And we start with some sort of idea. Maybe one of us would have brought in an idea. And then we just work on it and throw ideas back and forth. And it was fun. And it was quick."

Trust was at the core of that process, McCartney says.

"I had the song which became 'I saw her standing there' … My original first verse was: 'She was just 17. She'd never been a beauty queen.' I kind of looked at him. I said: 'I'm not sure about that line.' And he said 'No, it's horrible.' So we just thought a little bit extra. And it was like 'She was just 17, you know what I mean?' So yeah, to be able to solve problems, like quickly, with someone you could totally trust was a great boon for both of us."

Changing narrative

Pop culture never quite recovered from the Beatles breaking up in 1970 with McCartney's alleged "bossiness" blamed for the break-up.

But in 2021 Peter Jackson's brilliant remake of "The Beatles: Get Back" documentary changed that narrative.

It showed never-before-seen footage of the band working together on their 1969 album, "Let it be."

It painted a dramatically different picture of the events even for McCartney himself.

"I had kind of ended up buying into this idea that, you know, poor all other three, and I'm just bossing them around. But when I saw the film, I'm thinking 'No, I'm not.' It's OK. It's just us in the studio, and a lock-box in there, everyone's kind of happy to work like that. So, it was a big relief for me. It just made me feel really good about that whole period."

'Singing with my buddy again'

The Beatles first came to Australia in 1964, peak Beatlemania, provoking wild scenes in cities across the country.

McCartney remembers vividly how loud and supportive Australian audiences were.

"When you see the films of the reaction the Aussies gave us the first time round, it was exceptional. And, you know, you'd have to be half dead to not love it. So yeah, I have great memories of them."

This time, and now 81 years old, McCartney will return to Australia in October with Lennon.

It's thanks to a piece of technological magic first used in the filming of Jackson's documentary.

"Peter texted me and he said 'we could isolate John's voice out. And you could play live. And that would mean you will be singing with John again'," McCartney said.

"Wow. OK. I mean, but that's maybe too good to be true."

The end result was first seen at Glastonbury in 2022 when McCartney sang alongside Lennon projected on a mega screen.

"And that's really magic, because we really are singing together, even though it's through technology. So, I've also got to listen to his timing, which is great, because that's exactly how it is when you are live."

For audiences, it's like being transported back in time and for McCartney it is much more personal.

"The first time I ever did it was very emotional. And it keeps being emotional. Because, you know, I'm singing with my old buddy again."

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Paul mccartney and john lennon may be headed for a new hot 100 hit (as songwriters).

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(Original Caption) Beatle business...Beatles John Lennon (left) and Paul McCartney face the press ... [+] here, May 14th, and announce the establishment of an organization to serve as a catchall of the entertainment business. The British quartet has transformed its Beatles Ltd. into Apple Corps, Ltd., which has purchased, for $1.5 million an 18th century building on Savile Row to serve as headquarters for projects in films, electronics, recordings and merchandising. In their usual glib way, the two gave vague answers to newsmen's questions. "We don't know anything about business. We've hired people for that," was one example.

Paul McCartney and John Lennon are two of the most successful songwriters in American history. Together as Lennon-McCartney–the name applied to their biggest hits in the credits–they’ve scored more wins on the Hot 100 than most songwriters can dream of, and many of their singles were not just quick hits, but smashes that have enjoyed meaningful legacies. In a few days, the two will likely return to Billboard’s ranking of the most-consumed songs in the U.S., though they don’t have a new track.

Lennon and McCartney are credited as songwriters on Cowboy Carter , Beyoncé’s new album. The superstar covered The Beatles’ “Blackbird,” and it’s well on its way to becoming at least a minor hit on the charts in a few days.

For her rendition of “Blackbird,” Beyoncé has played around with the tune. Instead of it being a solo affair, the composition is now a group effort. Beyoncé credited fellow singers Brittney Spencer, Reyna Roberts, Tanner Adell, and Tiera Kennedy on the cut, who will all score an important hit in short order. She also renamed it slightly, as now there are two "i"s in the title, which is in keeping with the formatting she’s chosen for this collection.

There’s a good chance that Beyoncé’s “Blackbird” will hit the Hot 100 after Cowboy Carter has enjoyed a full tracking week. Most, if not all, of the tunes featured on the full-length will likely reach the competitive tally, upping Bey’s career total number of placements significantly–perhaps by 20 or more.

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The Beatles’ “Blackbird” never made it to the Hot 100, despite its immense popularity. The chart was formatted differently back in the late ‘60s, and only major singles reached the list. The song was featured on the band’s self-titled set, which is otherwise known simply as The White Album . It never earned its time to shine on the Hot 100 like so many other tracks from the group, but that may change soon.

Lennon and McCartney recently scored a new Hot 100 hit as songwriters just last year. The Beatles returned with their first single in decades, “Now and Then,” which unsurprisingly became a smash. That tune opened inside the top 10, bringing the Fab Four back to the highest tier on the tally.

“Blackbird” may become one of the top-performing cuts from Cowboy Carter , based solely on its position on the album. As fans stream the set in huge numbers, they’re more likely to play–and replay–the earlier cuts, while those later in the tracklist may not reach the same heights. There are some standouts on the project–based on how they ranked on platforms like iTunes and Spotify–but generally, with an album as massive as Beyoncé’s, the earlier the tune appears, the better its chances of finding its way to the Hot 100.

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Beyoncé Used Original Beatles Backing Track for ‘Blackbird’ on New ‘Cowboy Carter’ Version, With Paul McCartney’s Blessing

If the backing track on Beyoncé’s new recording of the Beatles’ “Blackbird” sounds especially familiar, there’s good reason for that. It turns out that the cover version she recorded for her “Cowboy Carter” album uses instrumental elements — McCartney’s acoustic guitar and foot tapping — taken from the Beatles ‘ original master recording, released in 1968.

That information was confirmed to Variety by a rep for McCartney, who cited Beyonce’s team, and other sources.

McCartney wrote and recorded the song by himself in 1968 for the Beatles’ self-titled double-LP, aka the White Album, letting the other members of the group sit it out as he accompanied himself on acoustic guitar and percussive foot-tapping. That’s exactly what is heard on Beyoncé ‘s fresh rendition, which has been retitled “Blackbiird,” in a spelling alteration similar to others on the album to reflect its “Act II” theme. Although the song is also credited to John Lennon, like a majority of latter-day Lennon-McCartney songs, it was written entirely by just one of them — and, in this rare instance, recorded by just one member as well.

McCartney has not yet commented on Beyoncé’s cover version of one of his signature ballads, although it can be assumed he’s greatly supportive, given how well the context of this new recording befits his stated original intent.

This is not the first time McCartney and other rights-holders have allowed the use of “Blackbird” tracks in another artist’s recording. Previously, in 2019, with McCartney’s permission, Rachel Fuller took the original Beatles track and added lush new parts by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Chamber Choir of London.

Beyoncé’s version also adds some strings and a violin and bass part, all credited to Khirye Tyler, who is credited as co-producer alongside McCartney and Beyoncé. But as for not just the guitar but the tapping (sometimes mistaken in the past for a metronome), that’s 100% Paul, recorded on Jun 11, 1968, exactly a week before he turned 26.

The new track is missing just one thing that appeared on the White Album version: bird noises. No word on whether the audio technology Peter Jackson’s team developed to separate audio elements for the “Get Back” documentary was necessary to de-bird “Blackbird.”

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Peter Brown, One of the Beatles’ Closest Confidants, Tells All (Again)

At 87, the dapper insider is releasing a new book of interviews conducted in 1980 and 1981 with the band and people nearest to it.

By Ben Sisario

Peter Brown stood in his spacious Central Park West apartment, pointing first at the dining table and then through the window to the park outside, with Strawberry Fields just to the right.

“John sat at that table looking through here,” Brown said, “and he couldn’t take his eyes off the park.”

That’s John as in Lennon. And the story of the former Beatle coveting this living-room view in 1971 — and how Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, eventually got their own place one block down, at the Dakota — is just one of Brown’s countless nuggets of Fab Four lore. In the 1960s he was an assistant to Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, and then an officer at Apple Corps, the band’s company. A key figure in the Beatles’ secretive inner circle, Brown kept a red telephone on his desk whose number was known only to the four members.

And it was Brown who, in 1969, informed Lennon that he and Ono could quickly and quietly wed in a small British territory on the edge of the Mediterranean, a piece of advice immortalized in “The Ballad of John and Yoko”: “Peter Brown called to say, ‘You can make it OK/You can get married in Gibraltar, near Spain.’”

Next week, Brown and the writer Steven Gaines are releasing a book, “All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words,” made up of interviews they conducted in 1980 and 1981 with the band and people close to it, including business representatives, lawyers, wives and ex-wives — the raw material that Brown and Gaines used for their earlier narrative biography of the band, “The Love You Make: An Insider’s Story of the Beatles,” published in 1983.

Now 87, Brown is a polarizing figure in Beatles history. He was a witness to some of the band’s most important moments and was a trusted keeper of its secrets. “The only people left are Paul and Ringo and me,” he said.

On a tour of Brown’s apartment, the spoils of his access were everywhere. In his bedroom, Brown showed off an original image of the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” with background figures (like Gandhi ) that didn’t make the final cut. In the dining room are binders and boxes stuffed with Beatle-related snapshots and correspondence.

But the publication of “The Love You Make” four decades ago also made him a kind of villain. According to Brown, the band agreed to interviews to set the record straight about its history. Yet the book — primarily written by Gaines, a journalist and biographer known for detailed, warts-and-all portraits — was seen as tawdry and sensational, preoccupied with sex lives and internecine conflicts, with music a secondary subject. Excerpts ran in National Enquirer.

To the band and many of those around them, it was seen as a betrayal. Paul McCartney accused Brown of misleading him by pitching it as a more general book about music in the 1960s. Linda McCartney said she and Paul burned it.

“That book was a shame,” Mark Lewisohn , the pre-eminent Beatles scholar, said in a recent interview.

“It’s almost like there are two different Peter Browns,” Lewisohn added. “There’s the Peter Brown I know, who is this upright, respectable, very successful businessman. And then the one who attached his name to this Steven Gaines book.”

Brown has heard all the criticism before, and waves it off. Sitting in a chair he inherited from Epstein — and dapper as always in a purple button-down shirt and charcoal slacks — Brown said the book stands as an accurate portrayal, and that the Beatles knew full well what they were getting into.

“There was never any effort on my part to make it negative,” Brown said in his unflappably gentle voice, as classical music wafted quietly through his home. “And nobody’s ever questioned that it was true.”

He also rejected McCartney’s version of events. “Paul imagines things,” Brown said. “Everything he does, he has his own way of remembering, and he’s crazy about it.”

Gaines, for his part, attributes the notoriety of the original book to his and Brown’s refusal to produce a sanitized hagiography, and their decision instead to publish controversial private details. Among those was a rumor that Lennon once had a sexual encounter with Epstein, which Brown and Gaines reported as fact, based on their research.

“Nobody had put something like that in a book,” Gaines said. That episode, on a trip to Spain in 1963, has been debated for years by Beatles commentators. Lennon denied having sex with Epstein, saying in an interview with Playboy: “It was almost a love affair, but not quite. It was never consummated.”

Brown and Gaines’s new book, “All You Need Is Love,” goes even deeper into Beatle lore than their first. It offers an extended transcript of Ono denying, not too persuasively, that she introduced Lennon to heroin, and includes various firsthand accounts of the threats and chaos the band faced on tour in Manila in 1966. Ron Kass, who led the Beatles’ Apple label, describes the impossibility of running a business with Lennon and McCartney as the bosses. One, he says, wanted the label design to be green, the other white; Kass decided to make each side a different color.

There are also startling comments from McCartney and George Harrison about Lennon, revealing the tension and raw feelings that were still present a decade after the band broke up, in interviews recorded just weeks before Lennon was killed in December 1980. Harrison calls his former bandmate “a piece of [expletive]” and wonders why he had “become so nasty.”

McCartney describes Lennon and Ono as “very suspicious people,” and portrays his relationship with them as a kind of power struggle.

“The way to get their friendship is to do everything the way they require it. To do anything else is how to not get their friendship,” McCartney says in the book. “I know that if I absolutely lie down on the ground and just do everything like they say and laugh at all their jokes and don’t expect my jokes to ever get laughed at,” he adds, “if I’m willing to do all that, then we can be friends.”

Lennon never got a chance to respond, Brown said. “I spoke to John, and said, ‘Listen, I’m coming to New York to do some of the recordings,’” he recalled. “And he said, ‘Yes, fine. Looking forward to it.’ And that was the week before he was murdered.” Ono’s interview was done a few months later, in the spring of 1981.

As with many Beatles histories, there are plenty of contradictions, opposing perspectives and selective memories. Interviews with the manager Allen Klein and the lawyer John L. Eastman offer an icy tit-for-tat on the battle for business control during the band’s last days. And Alexis Mardas, a.k.a. Magic Alex, the supposed inventor who others in the book call a con man, gives his account — with skeptical footnotes added by Brown and Gaines — of the Beatles’ retreat in India in 1968.

When asked about finding the truth amid contrasting accounts in an oral history, Brown turned philosophical. “It depends on where you’re sitting,” he said.

There are even conflicting stories about the genesis of Brown and Gaines’s new book. According to Brown, it began when a New York Times reporter — me — asked him for comment three years ago about “The Beatles: Get Back,” Peter Jackson’s exhaustive look at the band’s stormy recording sessions in early 1969. Brown realized then, he said, that he was one of the last remaining witnesses to important history.

But Gaines said that the origins of the project go back years before, to when he wondered what to do with the original interview tapes, which were languishing in his safe deposit box on Long Island. Gaines said he considered donating or selling them, but Brown demurred. They settled on a book of edited transcriptions, though they still squabble over details like ownership of the tapes. “It’s ‘Rashomon’ with Peter,” Gaines said.

After Brown quit his work with the Beatles on Dec. 31, 1970 — the day that McCartney filed a lawsuit to dissolve the band’s partnership — he came to the United States and worked with Robert Stigwood , the Australian-born entertainment mogul who had huge hits in the 1970s with the Bee Gees and the films “Saturday Night Fever” and “Grease.” Then Brown founded a public relations firm, BLJ Worldwide, which in 2011 came under scrutiny for its work representing the families of Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya and of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Brown declined to speak about that episode on the record.

But he remains most proud of his association with the Beatles, and said he viewed “All You Need Is Love” as a final gesture defining his legacy with the band.

“This is the end of it,” he said. “Hopefully we’re closing the door now.”

Ben Sisario covers the music industry. He has been writing for The Times since 1998. More about Ben Sisario

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